Ouch

Noonan and Instapundit hammer Obama:

His baseline political assumptions have proved incorrect, his calculations have turned out to be erroneous, his big decisions have turned to dust. He thought they’d love him for health care, that it was a down payment on greatness. But the left sees it as a sellout, the center as a vaguely threatening mess, the right as a rallying cry. He thought the stimulus would turn the economy around. It didn’t. He thought there would be a natural bounce-back a year ago, with “Recovery Summer.” There wasn’t. He thought a toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball struggle over the debt ceiling would enhance his reputation. The public would see through to the dark heart of Republican hackery and come to recognize the higher wisdom of his approach. That didn’t happen either.

He blew his wad on healthcare if you ask me. One could say he got unlucky with the economy...but you could also say GW Bush got unlucky with the insurgency. He spent all his political capital on healthcare when jobs were the priority. And the stimulus didn't work. In hindsight, it would have better to do a bigger stimulus or none at all. But the in-between had the misfortune of both looking like a waste of money and not doing enough to kickstart the economy. Basically, he was inexperienced and America fooled ourselves into thinking we had a savior. We were wrong.